In September 1937, anthropologist David Mandelbaum short documentary film.
One of the first cultural anthropologists to conduct ethnographic research in India was David Goodman Mandelbaum (1911-1987), who taught at the University of California, Berkeley from 1946 until his retirement in 1978. He spent two weeks with the Jewish community in Kerala during the High Holy Days in 1937, chronicling many of their practices, taking photographs and a short film, and gathering information that he published in “The Jewish Way of Life in Cochin” (Jewish Social Studies 1/1939) and other articles. Before coming to U.C. Berkeley, Mandelbaum served in the US Army in India and Burma during WWII and taught at the University of Minnesota. Among his many works was the authoritative two-volume “Society in India” (1970). His study of the Kerala Jews’ social structure had a considerable impact on subsequent research on them.
